Big feelings can sometimes make you feel like a total weirdo. When
you’re super-anxious, really scared or experiencing some other
yuck emotion, it’s easy to feel completely alone, like a faulty human
mistakenly set loose on an otherwise normal planet.
Melbourne-based musicians and mental health advocates Honor
Eastly and Graham Panther have both lived through the rather
pointy end of feelings like these. About a decade ago, Graham’s life
quite suddenly fell apart for no particular reason. He experienced
episodic breaks in reality, struggled to even drive or go shopping,
and tried all sorts of therapy and pills to get back on track. Honor,
meanwhile, spent 16 days on suicide watch in a psychiatric hospital
in 2014, after years of depression took a major turn for the worse.
Having seen the mental health system from inside, and then
subsequently worked in the industry as ‘lived experience’ advocates
and consultants, the couple gradually realised something big. Lots of
our official approaches to mental healthcare, while hugely important,
can inadvertently make the person going through it all feel more
isolated – and also like a bit of a loser. “For many of us, the only
people we unpack our messy stuff with are professionals who haven’t
had that experience themselves, or aren’t allowed to tell us,” Graham
says. “So we end up feeling more alone and weird than when we
first asked for help.” Honor’s experience has been largely the same.
“It took 10 years before I found someone else who’d had similar
experiences to me – and it was because I was in hospital.”In a bid to counter all that, the pair launched The Big Feels Club
earlier this year. It’s a grassroots attempt at sparking new ways of
talking about crisis and distress, hopefully helping to break down
some of the associated stigma and shame. “Public stories of people
who’ve had big, scary feelings are usually, ‘I was doing it tough,
I asked for help and I got better,’ or, ‘Look at these people who are
completely fucked,’” Graham says. “So we were like, ‘How do we
make a space for people who aren’t fixed, but aren’t fucked, either?’”
“Our vision is a society where hard life stuff is seen as an opportunity
to connect with other people, and asking for help isn’t difficult
because it’s not something only desperate people do,” Honor adds.
Their key approach so far is the Big Feels Book Club, which began
as a one-off experiment at Graham’s house. “A really random mix
of people came along, some of who identified as having their
own stuff going on, and some who were just interested. It was
no- questions-asked; just turn up, listen to a podcast and have a
chat,” Graham says. In meetings since, members have looked at
news stories, YouTube videos and a Tony Robbins doco, all related
in some way to crisis and mental health – but they haven’t read
a single book. “One of the difficulties was how to keep it in the
discussion space, rather than the therapy space. That’s why we
call it a book club,” Honor explains.The idea’s proven unbelievably popular, with folks writing in from
all over Australia and New Zealand, as well as Hawaii, Laos, Berlin
and the United Kingdom. For now, The Big Feels Club reaches out to
people beyond Melbourne through a fortnightly newsletter – a cherry-
picked collection of the most interesting mental health-related things
Graham and Honor have spotted or discussed. “Having access to
those kinds of conversations has changed my life. Now we sort of
package it up for others,” Honor says. But the couple has big plans in
their mission to make personal crisis an opportunity for connection,
and are currently investigating a bunch of options while chatting with
philanthropic bodies. According to Honor, “The Big Feels Club is not
necessarily about finding all the answers, but finding other people
who are asking the same questions.”big feels club
HONOR EASTLY AND GRAHAM PANTHER
ARE MAKING SENSE OF THE MESSY
STUFF OF BEING HUMAN.
Wor d s Koren HelbigPhotoBri Hammondour project